Electronic devices such as computer servers, telecommunications devices, and the like are often housed within cabinets or racks within a building or data center. An example of a rack may be defined as an Electronics Industry Association (EIA) enclosure and typically includes a plurality of open bays. Racks permit the arrangement of electronic devices in a vertical orientation for efficient use of space. The electronic devices are typically installed into respective bays in the rack and include servers, network switches, personal computer boards, and the like, which in turn include a number of electronic components, such as processors, micro-controllers, high speed video cards, memories, semi-conductor devices, and the like.
The floor plan of a data center includes the racks generally arranged side-by-side in rows such as in an X-axis and Y-axis array. The locations of the racks within the data center sometimes change as do the locations of the electronic devices within bays of the racks. Moreover, racks and electronic devices are sometimes added, replaced, or removed entirely from a data center. It is desirable to track such equipment changes in a data center and thereby maintain an up-to-date geographical inventory of the location of each rack within the data center floor plan and of the location of each electronic device within each rack, bay by bay.
Currently, however, it is burdensome to track such equipment changes in a data center along the X and Y axes (width and depth) at the rack level, but is even more burdensome to track equipment changes along the Z axis (height) at the bay level. Conventionally, the physical presence and location of electronic devices within a data center is determined manually. For example, during an inventory process, a network administrator typically walks from rack to rack around the data center and manually records the presence and location of network devices within each bay of each rack in the data center. Manual review and recordation of such information is time consuming, costly, and overly susceptible to human error.